Opinion: The danger of a single tweet – What Mayowa got very wrong about #Sugabelly

by Ikemesit Effiong

So Twitter (or more appropriately, social media) has been all the rage over last Wednesday’s edition of a popular relationships discussion session, No Holds Barred Interactive – or to use its more recognisable hashtag, #NHBi, and its virulent, and viral aftermath.

Now, you may be forgiven for not knowing what #NHBi is all about, so let me help you out. According to its blog, (yes, it has one), it is a No Holds Barred interactive online relationship discussion platform using social media for engagement. By no holds barred, it means no conceivable topic as it affects young people and relationships is off the block. Thus, it has addressed issues as a man having a married woman as his best friend, maintaining a healthy work and family balance as a pregnant spouse, hitting the relationship road running via social media and rape (what relationship platform wants to be takes seriously if it doesn’t address this?).

There have been hilarious editions, take this one on being the ‘side chic’ for example, and seminal ones as well, like this take on wedding day finances. How the platform works is that its organisers seek out Twitter personalities to be a ‘guest host’ the topic for a given Wednesday for the first 45 minutes (discussion starts at 9pm), and then the rest of the Twitterverse picks things up from there. Wednesday nights are rarely dull for veterans and addicts of the hashtag. The platform has been in its current format since last year.

Mayowa-Ogundele-1-273x411

No names, facts, history to prove this). Her central idea – “So, what is noble about sleeping with more (wo)men than you can remember? Nothing.” It was long on sentiment, short on arguments and utterly bereft of a concrete theme.

READ: #NHBi – Dear Sugabelly, NOTHING noble in having sex with many people (Part 1)

READ: #NHBi – Dear Sugabelly, there is NOTHING noble in having sex with many people (Part 2)       

Now that we’ve gotten the background out of the way, let’s trash out the main issue. Last week’s edition which was a second take by the show on the thorny subject of a woman’s ‘body count’ – a cheesy take on female sexual history and how society perceives unmarried, sexually experienced women – was hosted by comic illustrator, @sugabelly and her introduction was bang on the money – her second tweet stated the number of sexual partners she has had.

In actions reminiscent of Chimamanda Adichie’s injunction against the danger of a single story (make that a single tweet in our case), social media seized on it. There were viral misogynistic reactions; equally effusive tweets of support and in an act that transported #NHBi from a regular Twitter indulgence into a moot social conversation, prominent blogger Linda Ikeji did a post the same night about Sugabelly’s contribution.

I won’t delve into Sugabelly’s fired reaction to the post – which raised all sorts of issues about legal grey areas on copyright over tweets, just to mention one instance, or the slow reaction of the #NHBi team to the initial aftermath of Linda Ikeji’s post. I want to talk about two articles published on YNaija, written by Channels journalist and news presenter, Mayowa Ogundele, about Sugabelly’s comments.

Her first piece, posted on Monday, were 17 mono sentence paragraphs, consisting of scriptural precepts, clichés (“there are only two sides to a coin”, “head or tail”) and hasty generalisations (“Of all the world’s celebrated individuals, those who got caught in sexual immortality were disgraced… by those who didn’t” – No names, facts, history to prove this). Her central idea – “So, what is noble about sleeping with more (wo)men than you can remember? Nothing.” It was long on sentiment, short on arguments and utterly bereft of a concrete theme.

Alas, the second piece, posted Tuesday, was slightly better, but still bad. Still lots of clichés (“BTW, I think a cock’s favourite pastime is sex”, “One final word… SEX IS NOT A DIRTY THING. It is only dirty when you do it wrongly”) and no core argument, save that it could pass as a good guide for a Bible discussion among young people in a church meet on well, Wednesday night?

This is my problem with Mayowa’s take on the conversation around Sugabelly and the #NHBi discussion – she simply did not address the merits of Sugabelly’s take on the the female, sexual intercourse, society and how it prepositions women on how to use their bodies. Miss Ogundele perfectly ignored it.

If you go to the #NHBi Twitter account, and see its retweets of Sugabelly, you will see that she addressed very complex issues that Wednesday evening – sexual satisfaction, female emancipation, male insecurities and how male domination of society has spawned a long history of misogyny, sexually transmitted diseases and how men are overt and covert ‘carriers’, egotistic and gender skewed perceptions of motherhood – by the people wholly incapable of it and how it is simply wrong that men can be sexually promiscuous and be, well, ‘men’ while women in like manner are ‘hoes’. Miss Ogundele does not even breathe a hoot about all these.

It was simply the body count, expressed in just the second of 29 tweets, and a sermon about how to not have a body count before marriage, that sufficed for her.

In a democracy, with its reverence for the freedom of expression, I cannot begrudge Miss Ogundele’s take on this issue. She has a right to assert her views on any issue of her choosing. However, where such a view is wholly unhelpful to understanding an evolving conversation about a pressing issue – how society views, and treats its women – it should be discounted. Or better still, leave it unsaid.

In a society like Nigeria, where female discrimination in all spheres of national life is as routine as it is disturbing, a woman, especially one who is in the media and presumably possessed of the faculties and the vantage point to observe and make sense of this issue, should be able to offer a unique perspective, not quote the Bible without even advancing a worthy argument.

If Miss Sugabelly was too profane for your liking (which, by the way, seemed to be Linda Ikeji’s inference when she started her somewhat malicious post with the uncouth phrase “I was on twitter minding my own business when I saw…”), say so. Also, realise that millions of Nigerian men use profane, sexist terms on women daily and we perceive this as ‘one of those things’ – an attitude which Sugabelly riled at implicitly on Wednesday.

While I agree with Miss Ogundele that declaring your ‘body count’ helps no one, the simple gospel is that Sugabelly did not set out to boast about her sexual activities. Reading ALL of her tweets, the immediate reaction of her audience, her responses and the fervent conversation on gender issues that ensued would have showed that.

As Miss Ogundele’s problematic piece shows, this is the danger of a single tweet.

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

Comments (4)

  1. It is funny how we walk the paths already treaded mostly by failures like explorers in uncharted terrains. I emesis Effiyong, you must realize you are going to lead a generation of your offsprings, the least you can do is educate yourself and be principled. At the very least, act like your dad was a good father to you or pretend as the case maybe. Next, Sugabelly in my opinion is just an attention seeker and when reality comes knocking, she’ll leave you her ardent followers behind in a heartbeat. My advice “get a life”. Not every dumb either is worth a public laugh. Believe it or not, y’all need Jesus

  2. Thank you jare.
    The annoying part is not everyone is a christian. Not every Christian is judgmental too.
    We conveniently pick the tithing side of the bible and ignore the whoring part.
    Yes, the whoring part (as the holies call it). We had prostitutes, we had concubines, we had people doing orgies, then we had people sleeping with their fathers.
    Naomi sent her daughter-in-law purposely to go seduce a man. Queen Esther was sent to go seduce a man. The examples are rife.
    I didn’t intend to delve into the Bible but when the holies show up, I work with their argument.
    Thanks Ikemesit for dissecting this.

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